Featured Tracks:

Between their 2010 debut Gorilla Manor* *and 2013’s Hummingbird, Local Natives garnered a reputation in the indie landscape: dependable, gratifying, though not the most innovative. On Gorilla Manor, their cinematic emotions and soaring harmonies referenced the National’s slow-burning sweep and Fleet Foxes’ wide-eyed, bucolic tumble. With Hummingbird, Local Natives grew up with a more meditative album that dealt with the death of vocalist/keyboardist Kelcey Ayer’s mother. Though the rush of Gorilla Manor was missed, it was hard to knock the maturity and gravity that came with Hummingbird's more gradual revelations.

Sunlit Youth encounters aging, change, and where life has led you. It is, presumably, an album where they continue to employ new textures and approaches. The difference here is that there’s a discomfort to the shift, with some songs sounding like old-school Local Natives tracks with a weak neon facelift, and others sounding like imposters snuck into the studio and got a few tracks on the album somehow, mostly yielding negative results. It’s a growing pains album, but not exactly a rewarding one.

Far from the indie-folk of their earlier days, *Sunlit Youth *leans heavily on the synths and flirts with big-melody pop forms. “Past Lives,” a prime Local Natives composition emboldened by its synth leads, is a moving mission statement for the album. Despite the album’s title, Local Natives write more about the passing of youth, and “Past Lives” finds its way into a steadily intensifying gallop that captures the feeling of life starting to tumble forward as you age. Closer “Sea of Years” lands as if someone said, “We need the epic, swelling finale” and produced a checklist of necessary elements before actually writing it. Yet while the production and instrumentation render many songs on *Sunlit Youth *flat, “Sea of Years” is genuinely gorgeous, another moment where the themes of the album hit home. The instrumental melodies underpinning the chorus glimmer in the heat rather than charge headlong. It’s a convincing depiction of where these guys must be at, making anthems with more of life's baggage hanging around.

Then there’s opener “Villany,” a fluttering and pulsing track where Local Natives successfully inject themselves fully into the realm of synth-pop. There is mission-statement business on that song, too; the key lyric is the recurring refrain of “I want to start again.” Its spiritual partner, “Fountain of Youth” is the grating low of the album, with the answer to “I want to start again” coming in the chorus with, “We can do whatever we want!” Suddenly, the band starts peddling the brand of cloying, faceless indie-pop you’d hear as background annoyance at Anthropologie, or in trailers for a “Grey’s Anatomy” knockoff. Tracks like “Mother Emanuel,” “Psycho Lovers,” and “Everything All at Once” follow suit, conjuring a bastardized fan-fiction in which latter-day Coldplay made an album with the Lumineers. The big vocal refrains of Local Natives used to alternatingly evoke the glow of the West Coast and the real, transformative feeling that can still come from barreling down an endless American highway. Now they sound bloodless and unearned.

Across Sunlit Youth, there are flickers of what Local Natives do well, but the growth of their sound feels forced and awkward. You'll hear the funk excursion “Coins” touted and celebrated as one of the biggest stylistic leaps on the album. But it’s endemic of problems on about half of the album: One of the big draws of Local Natives were their melodies and their intertwined harmonies. Melodically speaking, they stumble on “Coins,” and they stumble on “Masters,” and they stumble on “Everything All at Once.” In the midst of rebuilding their sound, they’re less reliant on the subtle song-building of their past and lean more on big and broad emotions like they’re auditioning for a headlining spot at Sasquatch Music Festival. But in this half-formed state, they come off more like a mainstream rock band who can’t quite nail the big catharsis.

As a result, there’s something sadly anonymous about Sunlit Youth. It’s cloudy, distant, and inert when it should be effervescent. It clubs you over the head with choruses when Local Natives used to be capable of effortlessly lifting you up. As much as they try to sell that “We can do whatever we want!” chorus in “Fountain of Youth,” the song is jarring. They don’t sound like themselves, and it’s hard to believe those words, no matter how loud they sing them.